Nadia Vale opens her artist page and sees a photo of a man with a guitar she has never met. Half the releases are hers, the rest are acoustic ballads in Portuguese. Their names are spelled the same, and at some point the platform decided they were one artist. That is a merged profile, and fixing it takes a different approach from fixing a single song that landed in the wrong place.
Signs your profile was merged with someone else's
A merge rarely announces itself. It shows up as small oddities that add up:
- The photo, bio or about text belongs to someone else, and you cannot change it.
- Your discography contains releases in a language, genre or decade that has nothing to do with you.
- Monthly listeners or followers jump without any release or promotion from your side.
- Fans tell you their personal mixes started recommending strange music "by you".
- Someone else already has access to the profile in the platform's artist tools.
- The similar artists section looks like it belongs to a different scene.
There is also the reverse case. You released two projects under different names on purpose, say a pop alias and your instrumental work, and a platform merged them because the credits or your legal name matched. That needs the same kind of request, only with the opposite goal.
Check each platform separately. A merge on one service tells you nothing about the others, because each one matches artists in its own way.
Why it happens
Platforms build profiles from the data they receive. When a release arrives without a clear link to a specific existing profile, matching falls back to the name, and two people called Nadia Vale look identical to a system that only sees text. A featured credit can do the same: one feature on someone else's track, delivered without a profile link, and the system may connect two catalogues that used to be separate.
Sometimes the cause is a person, not a system. An artist with the same name claims the profile in the artist tools and starts editing it, sincerely believing every release there is theirs.
Collect the evidence first
Corrections are handled by people at the platform, and they need to see clearly which music belongs to whom. Before you write to anyone, prepare:
- A list of every release on the profile, each marked yours or not yours, with its title and release date.
- The UPC of each of your releases and, if you have them, the ISRC codes of the tracks.
- The link to the merged profile and, if you have one, the link to your correct profile on the same platform.
- Screenshots of the profile as it looks now.
- Short facts that tell the two artists apart: country, language, genre, years active, label or distributor.
- Links to your official channels, such as your YouTube channel and social accounts.
The goal is to make the split obvious. "This profile is wrong" is hard to act on. "These six releases with these UPCs are mine, the other nine belong to a Portuguese guitarist" is easy to act on.
How a split is usually requested
Send the request through the distributor that delivered your releases. They can raise it with the platform's content team, which a stranger writing to a general support address usually cannot do as effectively. Put everything in one message, platform by platform.
What to expect:
- One profile, two outcomes. Usually the existing page stays with one artist and the other gets a new profile. Which side keeps the original page, its followers and its history is the platform's decision, not yours or your distributor's.
- Separate timelines. Every platform handles corrections on its own schedule, and a fix on one does not fix the others.
- Both sides help. If you can reach the other artist, a polite message suggesting they report it through their own distributor often makes the picture clearer for everyone.
Do not take your releases down and upload them again to escape the merge. You lose the streams and playlist history attached to them, and if nothing else changes, the new upload may land on the same merged page.
While you wait
Share direct links to your songs instead of the artist page, so new listeners are not sent to a mixed profile. Hold off on pitching the profile to curators and on big changes in the artist tools until the split is done. Note when you sent each request and what the reply was. Corrections can take a while, and a short follow-up with the original details attached is easier for everyone to handle.
Prevent it next time
Most merges trace back to one weak point: the name, or a release delivered without a profile link.
- Before choosing or changing an artist name, search for it on the main platforms. If an active artist already uses it, change yours now, while it costs you nothing.
- On every release, give the exact profile link or ID of each artist, featured artists included. If you need a new profile, say so explicitly.
- Spell your name exactly the same way on every release and in every credit.
- After each release goes live, open your profile on every platform and look at it. The CULT portal shows the status on each platform, so you know when it is time to check.
A merge caught in the first days affects a handful of listeners. One discovered a year later has already mixed up a year of recommendations, so a quick look after every release is time well spent.